The idea that philosophy could be kept apart from the sciences
would have been dismissed out of hand by most of the great
philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. But many
contemporary philosophers believe they can practice their
craft without knowing what is going on in the natural and
social sciences. If facts are needed, they rely on their
“intuition”, or they simply invent them. The
results of philosophy done in this way are typically sterile
and often silly. There are no proprietary philosophical
questions that are worth answering, nor is there any
productive philosophical method that does not engage the
sciences. But there are lots of deeply important (and
fascinating and frustrating) questions about minds, morals,
language, culture and more. To make progress on them we need
to use anything that science can tell us, and any method that
works.

My overall view of Dave Winer is that he has brilliant ideas
ahead of their time and then does such poor implementation
that other people must send years cleaning up the mess created
by the early adopters on the basis of his half-written,
barely-thought-out specifications.

We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that
they’re willing to try to do what you do. We call them
“T-shaped people.” They have a principal skill
that describes the vertical leg of the T — they’re
mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so
empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as
anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore
insights from many different perspectives and recognize
patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need.
That’s what you’re after at this point —
patterns that yield ideas.

I am beginning to realize that different things motivate
different hackers. I don’t seem to be someone who comes
up with new and cool ideas that don’t have an associated
problem. I see myself as more the stodgy maintainer type who
worries first about compatibility and fixing existing problems
rather than seeding many new projects. And I’m OK with
that — the community needs both types (and not
exclusively those types).

Performance refers to executing as fast as possible, on a
given set of resources. Scalability, on the other hand,
is about executing as fast as needed, on as many resources
as needed. Performance is irrelevant when you can’t
scale. And if you can scale cheaply, then milking every ounce
of processor power should not be your first (or even fortieth)
priority.

As you know, colleges set their sticker prices by picking some
absurdly high figure, like $46,732 per year, then discount
like crazy, although they call their discounts
“financial aid.” But, they discount the way
economic theory predicts a monopolist would — by perfect
price discrimination, setting the profit-maximizing price for
each potential customer. You learn in Econ 101 that in the
real world, this theoretical result is seldom achieved because
firms can’t obtain all detail necessary about each
customer for setting the perfect price. If your econ professor
has s a rogue wit, he will then point out that there is a
single exception: American colleges, which insist upon
complete financial disclosure from applicants for
“financial aid.”

Rarely has the kabuki theatre of dictatorial progression
played out in such a pure form, with the players moving about
the stage in their formalized poses, and the people watching
the show all unaware of the deadly meaning of the symbols and
abstractions being portrayed.

Now, though, we have 1.8 million civil service
employees (plus about 800,000 in the post office and more
than a million in the military). That’s a large
voting bloc, especially in the states surrounding
Washington, D.C. And so members of Congress from Virginia
and Maryland, especially the Washington suburbs, have
become in effect representatives of the
bureaucracy in Congress.

The conclusion I draw from this and my own experience having
migrating my fair share of source trees is that the
version control system is a first order
effect on software, along with two others — the
build system and the
bugtracker. Those choices impact
absolutely everything else. Things like IDEs, by
comparison, don’t matter at all. Even choice of
methodology might matter less. Although I’m betting
there are plenty of software and management teams out there
that see version control, build systems and bugtrackers as
being incidental to the work, not mission critical tools.

At some point in the past rolling out an application to
300,000 people was the pinnacle of engineering excellence.
Today it means you passed your second round of funding and can
move out of your parents garage.

CEOs who support higher minimum wages are not, as the media often
casts them, renegade heros speaking truth to power because their
inner moral voice bids them be silent no more. They are by and
large, like Mr Sinegal, the heads of companies that pay well above
the minimum wage. Forcing up the labour costs of their
competitors, while simultaneously collecting good PR for
“daring” to support a higher minimum, is a terrific
business move. But it is not altruistic, nor does it make him a
“maverick”.

Bill Poser of Language Logasksif
the plain meaning of the [recess
appointments] clause renders most recess appointments
unconstitutional, why has this illegal practice been permitted to
continue for so long and, apparently, without much controversy?

To me, this seems like another example of what Barnett calls the
presumption of constitutionality.
The wording of the clause has been construed to allow for the
broadest amount of executive wiggle room, just as McCulloch v. Maryland construed the necessary and proper
clause so as to give Congress broad leeway in determining the
necessity and propriety of its own legislation.